Orientalism - autonomous learning

214 ORIENT ALISM
Orientalism Now
215
With such a Tennysonian Palace of Art in mind, Curzon and
Cromer were enthusiastic members together of a departmental
committee formed in 1909 to press for the creation of a school of
Oriental studies. Aside from remarking wistfully that had he known
the vernacular he would have been helped during his "famine tours"
in India, Curzon argued for Oriental studies as part of the British
responsibility to the Orient. On September 27, 1909, he told the
House of Lords that
our familiarity, not merely with the languages of the people of the
East but with their customs, their feelings, their traditions, their
history and religion, our capacity to understand what may be
called the genius of the East, is the sole basis upon which we are
likely to be able to maintain in the future the position we have
won, and no step that can be taken to strengthen that position can
be considered undeserving of the attention of His Majesty's Government
or of a debate in the House of Lords.
At a Mansion House conference on the subject five years later,
Curzon finally dotted the i's. Oriental studies were no intellectual
luxury; they were, he said,
a great Imperial obligation. In my view the creation of a school
[of Oriental studies-later to become the London University
School of Oriental and African Studies] like this in London is part
of the necessary furniture of Empire. Those of us who, in one
way or another, have spent a number of years in the East, who
regard that as the happiest portion of our lives, and who think
that the work that we did there, be it great or small, was the highest
responsibility that can be placed upon the shoulders of
Englishmen, feel that there is a gap in our national equipment
which ought emphatically to be filled, and that those in. the City
of London who, by financial support or by any other form of
active and practical assistance, take their part in filling that gap,
will be rendering a patriotic duty to the Empire and promoting
the cause and goodwill among mankind.1 2
To a very great extent Curzon's ideas about Oriental studies
derive logically from a good century of British utilitarian administration
of and philosophy about the Eastern colonies. The influence
of Bentham and the Mills on British rule in the Orient (and India
particularly) was considerable, and was effective in doing away
with too much regulation and innovation; instead, as Eric Stokes
has convincingly shown, utilitarianism combined with the legacies
'j.
of liberalism and evangelicalism as philosophies of British rule in
the East stressed the rational importance of a strong executive
armed with various legal and penal codes, a system of doctrines on
such matters as frontiers and land rents, and everywhere an irreducible
supervisory imperial authorityY The cornerstone of the
whole system was a constantly refined knowledge of the Orient, so
that as traditional societies hastened forward and became modern
commercial societies, there would be no loss of paternal British
control, and no loss of revenue either. However, when Curzon
referred somewhat inelegantly to Oriental studies as "the necessary
furniture of Empire," he was putting into a static image the transactions
by which Englishmen and natives conducted their business
and kept their places. From the days of Sir William Jones the
O~ient had been both what Britain ruled and what Britain knew
about it: the coincidence between geography, knowledge, and
power, with Britain always in the master's place, was complete. To
have said, as Curzon once did, that "the East is a University in
which the scholar never takes his degree" was another way of saying
that the East required one's presence there more or less foreverY
But then there were the other European powers, France and
Russia among them, that made the British presence always a (perhaps
marginally) threatened one. Curzon was certainly aware that
all the major Western powers felt towards the world as Britain did.
The transformation of geography from "dull and pedantic"­
Curzon's phrase for what had now dropped out of geography as an
academic subject-into "the most cosmopolitan of all sciences"
argued exactly that new Western and widespread predilection. Not
for nothing did Curzon in 1912 tell the Geographical Society, of
which he was president, that
an absolute revolution has occurred, not merely in the manner
and methods of teaching geography, but in the estimation in which
it is held by public opinion. Nowadays we regard geographical
knowledge as an essential part of knowledge in general. By the
aid of geography, and in no other way, do we understand the
action of great natural forces, the distribution of popUlation, the
growth of commerce, the expansion of frontiers, the development
of States, the splendid achievements of human energy in its
various manifestations.
We recognize geography as the handmaid of history..
Geography, too, is a sister science to economics and politics; and